The Pocket Mirror: 'Now why did you do that?'

By Virginia Florey

Published 3:45 am, Sunday, October 6, 2013

Socks and stockings seemed to be really important when I was growing up. Whole conversations between Mom, her mother and her sister-in-law would involve the subject of socks or stockings. A special day would be appointed for sock buying and endless discussions would ensue about the best place to buy socks, what kind of socks were best to buy and what kind of socks would last the longest. When you had four or five kids to buy socks for they also debated about the price.

Little girls wore anklets or long cotton stockings which could be white, brown or, oh my gosh, black. We were told that some people actually bought black stockings and the reason? They wouldn’t show the dirt so quickly. If we complained about having to wear long stockings for months on end (November to March, usually), our complaints were brushed aside with the comment that at least we had white stockings. We could have long brown stockings like some kids had to wear.

Stockings and anklets were sold by shoe size then. If you wore a size five shoe then you would wear a size eight stocking or anklet. If your feet were big and you wore a size seven or eight shoe, then you would take a size ten or eleven sock depending on how big it looked when it was stretched out by the clerk waiting on you at the sock counter. (Mom prided heself on the fact that she wore only a size five in shoes.)

Nothing came in petite, average, queen-size or regular. There was just short, medium and tall and you fit as well as you could into the nearest size that enabled you to walk upright without your stockings bagging around your knees or wrinkling around your ankles. If you were skinny like I was, you had to worry about your anklets slipping down inside your shoes if you had to walk very far.

There were several things to keep stockings up where they belonged. The simplest thing was a garter. This was a tight ring of rubber covered with rayon and you pulled this up over your stocking. Then you rolled the top of your stocking down over this rubber ring and hoped that:

1) your stockings would stay up all day.

2) your circulation wouldn’t be permanently impaired.

When you wore garters, you had to worry a lot about bending over and showing the patch of bare leg that existed between where the stockings ended and your underpants began. I remember in the fifth grade trying to pull my snow pants on and I accidentally bent over and Bob Schwartz was standing behind me. I was so embarrassed I considered staying home from school that afternoon but when I said no, I wasn’t sick, Mom wouldn’t let me.

This was also a problem with the little snap garters that your mother sometimes pinned on your undershirt. If you had your wits about you when your mother was dressing you in the morning, you stood a little stooped over so when you stood up the stockings would be pulled up nice and tight around your legs. You had to be careful, though. If you stood just a little too bent over, when you stood up the safety pin would go RIPPP and there would be a tiny hole in your white undershirt. Then your mother would say, “Now why did you do that?”

Young women wore garter belts or girdles and worried about keeping the seams at the back of their stockings straight. Garter belts were made out of something that was close to elastic and not only held your stockings up but also held your stomach in. They were time consuming to put on because they had to be positioned just right so that the garters attached to the garter belt were in position to attach to your stockings. Garter belts tended to slip down as the day went on and by evening stockings were beginning to feel loose on your legs and if you had sat all day the stockings looked a little baggy.

Was it possible to be comfortable and still be a lady? Certainly, but you would never have made the best-dressed list. You could wear anklets with your high heels or you could roll your “silk” stockings down to just below your knees and sort of twist them into a little knot to keep them tight. One of my favorite pictures of Mom is of her standing in the front yard wearing anklets with high heels and my brother Bud standing next to her. She is smiling and my brother is squinting the sunshine is so bright. For some reason it seems to be a happy moment in her life.

Older women wore corsets made from rubber which were clammy cold in the wintertime and dampish-hot in the summertime. Usually women who were “stout” wore corsets. We all knew what “stout” really meant but you could have held a gun to our head before we said the word.

Just before World War II a new product came out called nylon and stockings were made from this miracle substance. They were expensive but fit beautifully, were very sheer and had a black seam going right up the middle of the back of your leg. Going from anklets into nylon stockings was a Rite of Passage into Womanhood.